


it's you and me (i know it's our destiny)

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Pokemon GO - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 17:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21323893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: It’s just a kid’s game, he thinks when jealousy pangs in his heart.  But it’s more than just a kid’s game.It’s Pokémon.It’s the only good thing in his life.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 50
Kudos: 348





	it's you and me (i know it's our destiny)

**Author's Note:**

> This one's dedicated to all of youse who still play Pokémon Go! Shoutout to the members of Chicago’s PNR server, whence comes so much inspiration for this fic. 
> 
> OK KIDS if you don’t play Pokémon Go, I’m gonna give you some “key point summaries” right here. Because if you played in 2016 and then stopped, the game is very different now. When writing this, my brain was very “assume your reader plays PoGo” which has made it hard to go in and give explanations in text without it getting choppy, so I’m giving like...a glossary up here of things that weren’t part of the game by the time a lot of people stopped playing. I think I covered most of the key points. Sorry if I didn't <3 
> 
> Gyms: Pokestops, but with the capacity to battle other Pokémon and leave your Pokémon there to fight other Pokémon if your team claims possession of the Gym. If your Pokémon is in a gym for 10 minutes, you get one coin you can use in the Pokémon Go shop to get other game-useful items (capacity to hold more Pokémon; egg incubators; etc.) You can only get 50 Pokémon Coins from gyms per day.
> 
> Raids: Sometimes, special Pokémon will be “raid-able” in gyms for about 45 minutes. You go, you fight the Pokémon, and if you beat the Pokémon, you have the opportunity to catch it using Premier Balls which are limited in number per raid. An egg will appear above the gym about 45 minutes before the raid, and the color of the egg will indicate the difficulty level of the raid when it hatches. Some raids can be done alone, raids for legendary Pokémon usually require 4-8 other players to take down. This means that there tend to be raid organizations in Discord servers since Pokémon Go doesn’t have any form of messaging/organization in-app. In order to join a raid, you must use a raid pass. You get one free raid pass per day, but can pay for more if you want to go on a bunch of raids in one day. Raid events (like a three-hour raid day, though not the weekly Wednesday raid hour) will give a certain number of extra free raid passes as well.
> 
> Shiny: A Pokémon that has different coloring and which appears at random for players. There’s something like a 400:1 chance of getting a Shiny at random; for legendary Pokémon in Raids, it’s something like 20:1.
> 
> Friends: You can add friends in Pokémon Go, either through a QR code or a number code. There are five levels of friendship (good friend, great friend, ultra friend, best friend, lucky friend) that you get by sending gifts (containing various in-game items) to one another. Raiding with friends mean you’ll get extra premier balls if you beat the Pokémon. Trading with higher level friends (you can trade now, self-explanatory I think? You use Stardust to trade) costs less stardust.
> 
> Player Slang:
> 
> Hundo - A Pokémon with perfect stats. Every Pokémon spawned in every game has different stats (so no two Pidgeys are exactly the same) and a Hundo means it has a 100% IV (which is the term for those stats all combined together). Very rare, very sought after, good for gym battles.
> 
> Potato - A 0% Pokémon. Very rare, also sought after by collectors, though fucking useless in battle.
> 
> Shundo - A Shiny Hundo. Sort of like the holy grail of Pokémon. 
> 
> Lastly here’s a [Pokémon AU Gifset](https://shmisolo.tumblr.com/post/177677179542/oh-youre-my-best-friend-in-a-world-we-must) I made like a year ago which has nothing to do with this fic beyond my still being proud of it and thinking about it as I wrote this because Pokémon.

_ kyloren: @Lakeside anyone want to? _

At this hour, he can never tell what he’s going to get. People are on their way back from work and it’s a little too close to five p.m. to be a given. But he’s working from home today and he fucking wants that Shiny and the gym is a block away.

_ ChickenTenders: !i _

_ ChickenTenders: !i+1 _

That’s enough.

_ kyloren: @ChickenTenders when can you make it? _

_ ChickenTenders: We’re a ten minute bike ride? _

_ kyloren: !meet hatch _

_ Professor Hemlock: You have set the raid to meet at hatch. _

_ ChickenTenders: :thumbsup: _

“Come on, Rayquaza,” he mutters. He has over thirty already from the last time they’d been in the gyms. He’d gotten rid of the ones that had been less than 95% IV, and traded away the bad ones to see if his they had better stats with new owners. But he does not yet have a black and gold one. 

He grabs his battery pack because with his luck, half of Lakeside will be Rayquaza raids within the hour and his battery life is shit these days. He needs to get a new phone. Then he can put his dummy account on this one and he’ll be less worried about it glitching out all the time which is why he barely uses the thing now. 

The gym in question is a church two blocks from the lake, at least a hundred years old and made of lovely grey stone. He checks a few Discord channels (fucking Hux found a Shiny Sneasel already they’ve only just released the damn thing and of course he’s already bragging about it; as if Ben wouldn’t be bragging about it if he’d found one) before circling back to  _ #(5)-st-revan _

There are no updates from ChickenTenders and their plus one, and Ben looks around trying to find a sign of some Go players on bikes. 

The egg hatches. 

_ kyloren: @ChickenTenders you almost here? _

“Kylo Ren?” 

He almost jumps out of his skin. 

“Chicken Tenders?”

She smiles at him and it’s a fucking lovely smile, wide and making her face go bright. For one thing, she’s a she. There are girls who play Go, but he wouldn’t call them the majority and yeah, he assumes most new players will be men. Next to her is a black guy, leaning against his bike. 

“Do we want to friend up before we go?” she asks him. She’s already pulled up her QR code and he takes his out and scans it. True to her Discord handle, the invitation goes to ChickenTenders and then her friend holds out his phone and the invitation goes to FN2187. 

“Ready?” he asks her.

“Let’s go.”

“Can’t believe you got ChickenTenders,” he says as he selects his Rayquaza battle party.

She grins. “I’m just lucky.” 

“She has the best Shiny luck,” FN2187 complains. “It’s honestly disgusting. You’ll see. Bet she gets Shiny Rayquaza on her first shot.”

Ben forces a laugh as ChickenTenders elbows FN2187. “You both in the neighborhood?” he asks.

“Yep, just moved here from the South Side,” ChickenTenders says. 

“Nice,” he says. “Well, the neighborhood’s pretty organized for raids and stuff.”

“Yeah,” she says. “We went on Poe’s Raid Train a few weeks back.” Ben had been out of town and had burned with jealousy when he’d seen that Poe had gotten  _ three  _ Shiny Enteis and a Hundo. He hadn’t gotten  _ any _ in bumfuck because there weren’t enough people to coordinate doing the goddamn raids during raid events. Sometimes being a consultant fucking sucks. 

“We did  _ not _ have anything like that in Herald Park,” FN2187 says. The raid begins and they keep chatting as they tap their screens. 

“University people a little too self-involved for it?” Ben asks.

“Kind of. I don’t know. Might just have been that we didn’t think to join a Discord until we got to the North Side,” ChickenTenders says.

“You just graduate?” University of Coruscant gets out later than most other schools, and these two definitely look like they could be in the realm of new college grads. 

“She did,” FN2187 says. “I did a year ago but didn’t want to find a new roommate so I bummed around down in good old HP.”

“Nice,” Ben says, not really caring. “What are you up to now?”

“Social Work degree at DePeters,” ChickenTenders says. “He’s in tech.” 

They beat the Rayquaza handily and ChickenTenders squeals and FN2187 moans. “You fucking got a Shiny didn’t you.”

“Look at her!” ChickenTenders shoves her screen in FN2187’s face. “I love her.”

“Legendaries are genderless,” FN2187 grouses, swiping his finger across the screen to catch his stubbornly green Rayquaza. 

“She’s a pretty black dragon and I love her,” ChickenTenders says and turns to Ben. “Any luck?”

“Nah. Shitty IVs too.” He remembers from the last time Rayquazas were in gyms. It’s not as bad as that time Hux had gotten two Shinies in a row when it was Ho-Oh and Lugia in the gyms but  _ still.  _ He wanted that black dragon, and ChickenTenders had just gotten it. On her first raid, if FN2187 was to be believed.

“Well,” she says consolingly. “I’m sure you’ll get one soon. You’ve got a whole month.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It was nice meeting you.”

“And you.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood.”

——

He starts sending them gifts. He has his prioritizations after all:

  1. The people in the neighborhood he raids with.
  2. People he finds on Reddit when he’s going to be traveling so he can hopefully get Ultra Friends with them before he crosses the world and maybe can get a good regional trade out without spending too much stardust.
  3. Other people.
  4. Hux.

He doesn’t see them at the raids he keeps going to. Maybe ChickenTenders has gotten her Shiny and so doesn’t care about continuing to raid. People are like that sometimes, but he’s not. You can always find something else. You can find a potato, you can find a hundo, or—and he doesn’t ever let himself hope for this one—a shundo. There’s always the better Shiny—the battler you can put in a gym; there’s always something rarer, something that other trainers can’t find if they’re just clicking around on the train on their way to work.

Yeah, it means you have to pay money for raid passes and super egg incubators, but the investment is worth it. 

Within a few days, he and ChickenTenders are Great Friends. Then the real gift-giving slog will begin. She’s fast on the uptake. She sends him gifts in reply to his own, always a one-to-one ratio, and he decides that that reflects well on her character. Better than FN2187 who opens his gifts but never sends them in reply, which makes Ben stop sending them all together. The only reason he doesn’t take FN2187 off his friend list is that if they’re at a raid together again, he wants that friend bonus. Every ball helps when the legendary isn’t Shiny and he hasn’t had ChickenTenders’ luck: he still doesn’t have the Shiny Rayquaza. 

He sees it every time he sends her a present. She’d named it Queenie and there it is, hovering gold and black at her back. 

_ It’s just a kid’s game,  _ he thinks when jealousy pangs in his heart. But it’s more than just a kid’s game.

It’s Pokémon.

It’s the only good thing in his life.

——

He wishes that were an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. 

He spends about half of his time out of town. Sure, he gets to travel around the world on the company dime, but it’s a lonely life. It’s hard to make friends when you are never around consistently. There aren’t classes he can sign up for or activities he can undertake regularly. And it’s not like he had much by way of friends before. He’d known Hux in college, they’d both gotten recruited to the same consulting company, but he wouldn’t go so far as to call Hux a friend, even if they both play Pokémon Go. In fact, he’d be perfectly content to never see Hux again in his life. Everyone’s always comparing them and he doesn’t like the comparison. And he can’t stand Hux’s sneer every time he catches something good that Ben doesn’t have.

Hux started playing in 2016, mostly because his friends (because Hux had friends from college. Ben didn’t have friends, period, was too much of a vicious, uncontrollable asshole to have friends, but Hux had friends in college) had started playing. He’d gotten into a game that had actually mattered to Ben just for a laugh and then hadn’t even had the good grace to bow out of it like most people did once the seasons changed and people lost interest. He was still around. He was still in the fucking server, a constant reminder of everything Ben could be if he weren’t a mess. 

Hux had probably never driven his own parents out of his life. Hux probably wasn’t paralyzed by the knowledge that they were probably happier without him. Hux hadn’t needed Pokémon to get him through the agonies of adolescence.

And Hux already had a Shiny  _ fucking _ Sneasel.

——

_ CommanderPoeGo: @Lakeside @Buford Park @Lakeside East SUICUNE RAID DAY IS COMING UP AND I’LL BE LEADING A RAID TRAIN THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOOD. WE’LL BE PLAYING ON THE MOVE—ONCE WE’RE IN THE BATTLE, WE’LL MOVE ONTO THE NEXT ONE SO DON’T REJOIN IF YOUR MONS DIE. 3-6PM.  _ _   
_ _ ITINERARY: THE USUAL—MEET AT THE MARINA. _ _   
_ __ LATECOMERS: PLEASE DM ME FOR OUR UP-TO-DATE LOCATION

Ben’s more than a little fucking relieved as he reads through Poe’s message. He’s actually in town for this one, and not on a plane to an assignment. He’d had to practically give an arm and a leg to Hux in exchange for the Shiny Entei he’d missed and he’d felt dirty doing it. (Thank fuck he’d had a Tropius from one of his work trips because he had  _ not _ wanted to get rid of his Shiny flowercrown Eevee.) He’ll be flying out that night—red-eye out west so there’ll be plenty of time for him to go home, quick shower, and then get to the airport—and also hopefully get himself a few Shiny Suicunes as well.

He gets to the marina five minutes before the raids begin and sees Poe on the corner. Poe’s got a harness on with two water bottles, his external chargers, and has a phone in each hand. He’s wearing his lucky Pikachu shirt and the baseball cap he’d gotten at GoFest this past year. He waves at Ben as he approaches.

“You got that Shiny Ray yet?” he asks. 

“Not yet,” Ben grits out.

“That sucks, dude,” Poe replies. “Hux just got his third.”

“Yeah, I saw.” Ben does not want to think about Hux. He hopes to fuck Hux won’t be on Poe’s raid train today. He spies Phasma, though, and DJ, and Mitaka, and a few others he’s been raiding with on and off now for a few years. 

“Ready?” he asks with thirty seconds before start.

“We got two more coming,” Poe says and Ben gets this feeling down deep in his gut. It’s going to be ChickenTenders and FN2187. And sure enough, as he cranes his neck to look down Lakeside Drive, he sees them approaching, phones in hand. 

ChickenTenders waves. “We’re in range!” she calls.

“Awesome,” Poe shouts back. “Hop in then.”

They join the gym lobby, and Ben doesn’t even bother picking his best battlers. There are eighteen people in the gym, they’ll beat the thing fine. Suicune is not a buff Pokémon.

“Let’s move,” Poe commands the moment the battle begins, and they begin walking down the street towards the next gym, clicking on mystical water dog as it lashes at them from the little digital gym. And sure enough, right as they arrive at the stopping point for the next raid, and Ben holds his breath as he waits for the screen to load…

“Normie,” he announces as he begins swirling a curveball lazily at the Suicune. 

No one else announces anything except then—

“I’m out, see y’all bitches later,” FN2187 is grinning.

“You got it?” Ben asks sharply.

“Yeah,” he grins. “Have a good evening.”

But he sticks around with them anyway, and Ben’s sure that he’s still hunting because ChickenTenders is still there. Or maybe not. Who knows.

“What’s Hundo on this one again?” Phasma asks.

“Seventeen-oh-four,” Ben replies without batting an eyelash. 

“Not quite there,” Phasma sighs, shrugging. 

“Maybe next time,” ChickenTenders smiles at her. Phasma—as a rule—doesn’t smile. It’s like her face doesn’t know how to. But she makes an attempt with the new girl, her lips curling slightly, her eyes remaining cold.

“Where’s your Shiny magic gone?” Ben asks ChickenTenders.

“Oh, it’ll be there,” FN2187 says. “Just you wait, she’ll have five shinies by the time the train is done.”

They kick off the next gym and as they’re waiting in the lobby, Poe says, “Poe,” and extends his hand pointedly at FN2187.

“Finn,” Finn replies. 

“Rey,” says ChickenTenders when she shakes Poe’s hand.

“Short for Rachel?” Poe asks.

“Nope. Just Rey.”

The gym begins and they click away, marching down the street to the next gym. Ben watches Rey out of the corner of his eye. Her hair is up in a side-ponytail, her skin is summer suntanned, and there’s an intriguing lightness to her face that he can’t quite let go of. 

“Misty?” he asks, nodding to her ponytail. She blinks at him, confused. “Because of the hair.”

“Oh!” and Rey laughs. “No, just it’s too hot. Slightly better neck ventilation this way.”

“Ah. Right.” He brushes his own hair out of his face. “Hadn’t thought of that.” He needs a haircut. His hair is getting a shaggy sort of long. But with his travel schedule, the last thing he wants to do when he’s home is go and get a fucking haircut. Not when he’s in a place where he can actually consistently play. 

“You must get a hot head in summer,” Rey nods at him. “With hair that dark and—”

She goes still, looking down at her screen. 

“Shiny?” Ben asks. His is decidedly not. And it’ll probably have  _ bad _ IVs based on its CP stat. 

Rey turns her phone to Finn. Finn takes one look at it and says, very loudly, “Motherfucker. You’re no fun to play with at fucking all.”

“What’d you get?” Ben asks, his heart lurching.

“A fucking Shundo. She got a fucking Shundo.”

Rey is smiling quietly as she throws a pokeball and Ben catches her screen at an angle. There’s Suicune, with its deep blue mane and the numbers  _ 1704 _ floating above it before the white premier ball locks it away. 

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Rey tells Finn.

“I’ll hate whatever I damn well want. You’re not the boss of me.”

They go, and go, and go. Slowly on all sides, the other raiders sigh with relief. They’ve found their Shiny. They’ve found their second. In Rey’s case, she’s found her fourth.

But Ben hasn’t found one. He hasn’t even found a Hundo. It’s been a complete waste of an afternoon. 

By the time they reach their last raid, he wishes he’d never started playing Pokémon Go. He wishes he’d never liked Pokémon at all. He wishes he hadn’t sunk hours and hours into playing Red and Yellow and Gold and Crystal and all the other fucking games while his parents had argued and argued and argued and he’d never been good enough, not a good enough son, not a good enough  _ person _ . At least in Pokémon, he could be good enough. But now he doesn’t even get  _ anything _ out of a fucking Suicune raid day. He wants to chuck his phone into the street. 

“Want one?” Rey asks quietly as people start saying goodbye. He should go home, take his shower, and get on his fucking airplane out west. 

He stares at her. “It’ll cost too much stardust.”

She shrugs. “I got stardust. You want it?”

He swallows. There’s pity in her eyes and he can’t stand it, and he’d felt so fucking dirty and desperate when he’d traded Hux for his Shiny Entei.

“Nah,” he says, shrugging. “I’ll raid for it next time. Thanks though.”

“Ok,” Rey says. “If you change your mind, though,” and she holds up her phone. One of her Shinies has been renamed KyloRen. “It’s yours.”

His throat gets a bit thick. “Thanks,” he says.

“Sure thing,” she smiles.

She has such a fucking beautiful smile.

He almost forgets that he was feeling low and angry as he stares at it. It curves just the right way, full lipped and a little bit grinny. Her teeth are nice too. Everything about her is nice. 

And the jealousy that she’d gotten six shinies, one of which was a fucking Shundo, diminishes in the shade of her smile.

——

He’s back in town—thank god—for the legendary dogs in the gyms a few weeks later. He can’t even get his head to  _ think _ about Shiny Mewtwo two weeks after while Shiny Suicune still plagues his every being. He goes downtown for the raids because no one in Lakeside is still hunting for Shiny dogs except him. And sure, Rey had promised to trade him the Suicune if he needed it, but he wants to get it on his own if he can.

He almost cries with relief when it pops up in his third raid of the week. He can breathe now. He sets it as his buddy for a few days so that people will see that he did get it in the end—and that it doesn’t have bad stats either—without throwing it in the _ #bragging-rights  _ channel of Discord.

That doesn’t stop a message from popping up though as he’s at the gym (the real gym) that night.

_ ChickenTenders: You got it!! _

No one ever DMs him on Discord. He knows that Poe has a few private servers he’s in with some of his raiding friends, but Ben’s never been asked to join. He’s never wanted to join. But Rey pinging him out of the blue like this makes him smile.

_ KyloRen: Yeah. Earlier today. I can breathe now lol. _

He stares at what he just typed. When—in his entire goddamn life—has he ever written out the word  _ lol _ ? Ever? His dad does sometimes in texts, when he remembers to try to text, to try and rebuild a relationship with the son who drove him away—a baffling attempt to be “hip with the kids” but Ben doesn’t lol, he doesn’t lmao, he doesn’t brb. But he just loled with Rey.

_ ChickenTenders: Just in time for Shiny Mewtwo raids ;-) _

_ KyloRen: Don’t let me even think about that yet. I’m going to have a heart attack. _

Rey sends a gif of a laughing chicken which makes him ask,

_ KyloRen: What is it with you and chickens? _

_ ChickenTenders: You have to be PoGo Best Friend to unlock my tragic backstory. _

_ KyloRen: Tragic Backstory? About chickens? _

_ ChickenTenders: Yes. _

Ben pulls up his app and clicks to Rey’s profile. Then he rolls his eyes.

_ KyloRen: Only like 60 days to go then. _

_ ChickenTenders: At that point we’ll be practically married, won’t we ;-) _

_ KyloRen: Well, I don’t think Pokémon Go lets you get married to someone, so no, we won’t be. _

_ ChickenTenders: Rats. I suppose you don’t bring much to the table. You don’t even rake in good shinies. _

His stomach lurches. He knows it’s a joke, but especially given how her smile had made him feel unexpectedly better after the Suicune Raid Day, he doesn’t know what to make of this. 

He just knows he wants to joke back, even if it sucks.

_ KyloRen: I can be the househusband. Clean out all your 0 and 1 stars for you. _

_ ChickenTenders: I’ll consider your offer. _

_ ChickenTenders: No but seriously—I’m glad you got it. You looked really cut up about it. _

He swallows.

Not once has anyone ever said something like that to him.  _ It’s just a game,  _ sure. That one especially from his parents. But no one in the Discord cares if you don’t get it and what it feels like when you don’t—just that you’re still on the hunt and bad luck. It is bad luck. But they don’t know his history with bad fucking luck.

_ KyloRen: Thanks. I’m glad I did too. _

_ KyloRen: See you for Mewtwo raids? _

_ ChickenTenders: Duh. You doing the Deoxys ones next week? _

_ KyloRen: Nah. I got them all in Ex-Raids. _

_ ChickenTenders: Ugh. I never get Ex-Raid passes.  _

_ ChickenTenders: I suppose it would help if I actually raided at Ex-Raid gyms XD. _

It takes Ben five seconds longer than it should to realize that XD is an emoticon. 

_ KyloRen: I can send you one next time. I already have my king Mewtwo so I don’t need one if I get it. _

_ ChickenTenders: Don’t we have to be Ultra Friends first? _

_ KyloRen: Ya, but that’ll happen before we’re married, so. _

_ ChickenTenders: I get it. This is what you bring to the marriage table. Ex-Raid passes. Your dowry has refined itself. _

_ KyloRen: In my industry we call that diversifying the portfolio _

_ ChickenTenders: I can’t marry you if you use words like that. Sorry. _

That’s when he realizes he’s smiling and he almost falls off his treadmill in shock.

He doesn’t smile.

Nothing makes him smile. Nothing except getting a Shiny before Hux does. 

He certainly doesn’t smile on the treadmill at the gym while chatting with a girl named Rey who goes by ChickenTenders. Girls don’t joke about marrying him for his Pokémon. Usually if it comes up he plays Pokémon on his sad attempts at dating, he gets a blank look of  _ oh that game everyone played for a few months in 2016? You’re still playing that? Isn’t that a kid’s game? _

But he’s smiling. Grinning, really. Like a big fucking idiot. 

——

He drops a ton of cash on super egg incubators the following week. His Shiny hatching luck isn’t the best, but he’s still going to try for the Shiny regionals if they’re coming out of 7km eggs this week. He opens every gift obsessively. What wouldn’t he give to get a Shiny Farfetch’d or something. He feels like he  _ needs _ to, just to show he can, in fact, get good Pokémon after the fiasco that was the Suicune raid day.

He goes to two Deoxys raids because Rey puts them in the Discord—one for Normal Form and one for Defense Form. They get the normal one fine, but three—because Finn had come along to the Defense Form fight—was not even close to enough for that one. Neither of them is level forty, and even if he brought out his best battlers, the clock ran out on the raid.

“Ahh well,” Rey says, shrugging down at her phone. “This one’s been a doozy.”

“You going to do raid hour?” Ben asks, but Rey shakes her head. 

“I have work. It’s been tricky doing raids this week.”

“Want one of mine? I have a spare.”

_ What _ is he doing? He’d been planning on saving a Deoxys for… for… he doesn’t know. Something good, maybe. A traveler coming through who wants to trade but doesn’t live near an Ex-Raid gym so they have regionals but not Deoxys. And it’s not like Deoxys are valuable trades anymore, after this week.

“Should we wait until Ultra Friends at least?” She asks. “So the stardust toll isn’t insane?”

He shrugs. “I have stardust.”

She turns her phone towards him. “What do you want? You probably already have most of my good stuff.”

He does. She has two Shinies he doesn’t have yet, but he won’t ask her to part with them for a fucking Deoxys Defense Form. He’ll get those eventually.

“I’ll take whatever,” he shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”

Rey snorts. “Wow you must really want to marry me. See Finn? He wants to marry me.”

“I get it. I’ve been replaced,” Finn says dryly and Ben’s heart clenches. Yeah. Yeah, of course they’re dating. They always raid together and they’re clearly close. 

“You replaced  _ me _ , remember?” Rey says elbowing him playfully but Ben catches it—just a flick of her voice, a mildly hurt intonation that she’s burying beneath the playfulness. A wound she doesn’t want to admit to, or acknowledge, or something.  _ Maybe they aren’t dating? _

Finn is rolling his eyes but looking concerned but Rey clearly doesn’t want to keep going. She turns back to Ben and yes—he sees it. He recognizes that now. 

He can fucking see when someone’s trying so hard not to admit how upset they really are.

_ What’s going on? _

She trades him a Snorlax—nicknamed “Snugglebut” with one t, presumably to avoid Niantic’s nickname censorship—and gives him the same wide smile she has given him before except there’s something different now. Her eyes aren’t quite as bright.

——

_ CommanderPoeGo: @Lakeside @Buford Park @Lakeside East THREE-FOR MEWTWO RAIDS. #MEWTWO-STADIUM #MEWTWO-BELLEVIEW-ICE-CREAM #MEWTWO-IHOP.  _

Ben gets off the train and instead of heading east, he goes west towards the stadium. He can already see the Mewtwo floating above the gym in his app. He’d done five raids at work that day—three during his lunch break and two during the coffee break no one questions him about because they know he has a fucking temper when he gets tired and one right before the start of work. He’s going to have better luck with Mewtwo than with Rayquaza. He’d done ninety Rayquaza raids, dropping  _ so _ much cash on more raid passes and for nothing. He’d gotten two Hundos, but whatever. He’d wanted the Shiny and Hux had finished up the month with four. 

Mewtwo, though—Mewtwo is something else.

He’d dressed up for Mewtwo for Halloween one year. He’d dragged his dad to the Pokémon movie no fewer than six times, staring hungrily at the screen as Mewtwo grappled with what it meant to be created and then loathed. Something about the Pokémon had resonated, but he’d been too young then to understand why. 

Now he gets it. 

But whatever. 

Mewtwo. He’s going to get that green Mewtwo.

Rey’s waiting across the street from the stadium. It’s hot as all hell today and she’s wearing her hair up in three little buns—for ventilation, he assumes again.

There’s no sign of Finn.

“Going solo today?” he asks her and she looks up from her phone. 

“You’re wearing a suit,” she points out.

“Coming from work.”

“It’s ninety degrees out.” She sounds appalled. He shrugs. “You’re going to get heat stroke.”

“I’m not going to get heat stroke,” he says. But he does shrug his sport coat off, fold it, and rest it over his messenger bag. He rolls up his sleeves and puts his tie in his pocket. Rey’s staring at him the whole time. 

“You’re still going to get heat stroke,” she mutters.

“I’ll just take my pants off too.”

“Husband, behave,” she replies. 

Maybe it’s the playful tone that makes him bring it up again. “Finn not joining?”

“Nah. It’s date night with his girlfriend.” She tries to sound light. She tries to sound casual. But there it is again, that hurt.  _ You replaced  _ me _ , remember? _

“Good thing we have a date night too,” Ben says and she gives him almost a shy smile. 

“Date night with Mewtwo raids. The best of dates.”

——

Unfortunately, their “date night” produces no Shiny. They don’t have better luck on Tuesday, either, but Ben’s ok. There’s still time. There’s still raid hour Wednesday Night. 

Except there’s not, because Niantic sends a message to their phones cancelling the thing.  _ We’ll reschedule for a later date. _

He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it. Maybe it’s that they’d chatted—when does Ben actually chat?—a fair amount in the past few days, maybe it’s that he’s feeling punchy because he hasn’t gotten the Shiny yet, maybe it’s that he’s traveling all of next week and won’t see her smile but he sends her a DM on Discord.

_ kyloren: wanna raid anyway? _

_ ChickenTenders: sure! I’m sure stuff’ll be going on in the neighborhood. _

And true enough, Poe has posted in his raid train channel:

_ CommanderPoeGo: I WILL BE RAIDING ANYWAY. WE’LL SEE WHERE THE EGGS SPAWN. KEEP AN EYE ON THIS CHANNEL FOR INFO. _

They raid with six other people for an hour or two. Ben runs out of raid passes and spends more money on them. At this point, he’s probably given the financial value of his soul to Niantic on Pokémon Go items, but he doesn’t care. He’d sell his soul for a Shiny Mewtwo. As they begin hour three, with no five-star eggs in sight, Rey turns to him and says, “Tacos?”

And before Ben is even aware that that’s what’s happening, his mouth is saying the word, “Yes,” and he is following Rey to a taco joint he’s never been to a twenty minute walk from his apartment.

“We have through Monday at least,” Rey says as she settles down with her tacos. She has four of them, and is already picking one up to shove into her mouth. 

“Sunday for me,” Ben grunts. “I have to fly out for work and I can’t count on raids when I travel.”

“Really?” she asks. “Not even in the cities?”

“Hard to get around for them. Not all cities are as dense as Coruscant.”

Rey frowns. “That sucks.”

“Yeah. I practically had to suck Hux’s dick for a Shiny Entei I missed. If I’d have known that there was going to be a Shiny raid week that soon afterwards, I’d have just waited.”

Rey pauses in her chewing, clearly waiting to say something until after she swallows. “Did you get a Shiny Entei last week?”

“Nah, but I didn’t go to any Entei raids. I got so many of them from the weekly research tasks and I had my Shiny, but didn’t have Suicune yet, and wanted to see if I could get a better Raikou since all of mine are trash.” She nods and he watches as she forks some of the taco filling that had fallen out of her taco into her mouth. “How’d you make out?”

She shrugs. “It was a bad week so I didn’t get to raid much,” she says.

“Oh yeah? Everything ok?”

She looks off in the distance as though trying to decide what to say, and Ben holds his breath. 

Now is a moment, a turning point. He doesn’t know what lies on the other side, just that it will be different. Or the same. The same but worse, somehow, because it is the same and not different.

“Finn moved out,” Rey says quietly. “He moved in with Rose. Which is fine. I’m happy for them. And I have a subletter who seems ok. But I’ve lived with him for ages, and we just moved up to the North Side, and I don’t…” she pauses, her breath shaking and this time when her eyes are bright, he knows it’s because of tears.

“You don’t...” he nudges gently. (When has he ever been gentle before? He’s someone who throws furniture, who breaks things, who people avoid eye contact with. They don’t look at him like he’s throwing a life support to them and he’s not gentle.)

“I don’t take being left behind well,” she says quietly. And there are actually tears on her face now, a single one dropping down from under her left eye, and one pooling in her right. “I tell people ChickenTenders comes from my last name being Sanders, but really it’s that I ate a  _ lot _ of them after my parents abandoned me. They’re my comfort food. Chicken never lets you down.”

And as if to prove a point, she takes another bite of chicken taco and the tear that had been gathering in her right eye drips down her cheek. 

“Anyway,” she tells him, her mouth full now. Her cheeks are going pink, her face a little embarrassed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to overshare there.”

“It’s ok,” Ben says, his voice thicker than he thought it would be. He doesn’t know what to say. He knows that this is the moment where he’s supposed to come through, right? Someone is in pain and you’re supposed to be there for them? But no one ever comes to him when they’re in pain, probably because they think he’ll make it worse, not better. Because that’s all he’s ever done in his life, make it worse not better. He doesn’t want to make it worse for Rey. He wants to make it better. But he doesn’t know what he’d say. No one’s ever said anything comforting to him that sounded anything more than just hollow words.

“I’ve just never felt so alone,” Rey mutters, looking down at her plate. She’s demolished those chicken tacos. 

“You’re not alone,” Ben tells her softly and she looks up, her eyes bright and they stare at each other for a long moment. Her eyes flick between his, his flick between hers, and he doesn’t know what possessed him to say that, not being alone and not feeling alone aren’t the same thing after all—he’d learned that young with his parents and Pokémon.

“Neither are you,” she whispers. 

He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he lets it go. And he almost jumps out of his skin when her hand brushes his thigh under the table as it searches for his.

——

_ ChickenTenders: Thanks for earlier. It meant a lot. _

_ kyloren: I’m glad I was helpful.  _

_ kyloren: I don’t like seeing you that sad _

_ kyloren: I know you feel like you’re alone and that’s not the same as being alone _

_ kyloren: And I know it’s hard to feel like anyone can understand that _

_ ChickenTenders: I feel like everyone thinks they know me. And they don’t. Not really. No one knows me. _

_ kyloren: but I do _

Shit.  _ Shit _ . He hadn’t meant that to come right after her long sentence. Not like that. Because he definitely doesn’t know her.

_ kyloren: I’d like to. Know you, I mean.  _

_ ChickenTenders: You’re not alone either. _

_ ChickenTenders: And I’d like that. Knowing you, I mean. _

_ ChickenTenders: Raids tomorrow? _

_ kyloren: It’s a date. _

——

He spends most of the day worrying that it’ll be weird. Part of him hopes that he can get the Shiny during one of his work raids so that he can fake a work emergency and not go. Because whenever people have relied on him, have wanted him to be something, he’s only ever let them down. 

_ I don’t take being left behind well. _

He’s not going to do that to her. He’s not. Just because he’s a fucking coward who doesn’t know what to do with finally having something—maybe, he thinks—with a girl? It’s not like it’s fucking easy to be the family disappointment, but Rey—he doesn’t want to disappoint Rey. He knows he inevitably will, but there’s still this thumping hope in his chest that maybe, just maybe…

So they meet by the Stadium at 5:30pm. They’re not by themselves at all—they’re with the other raiders, all still hunting for that green Mewtwo. But they stand next to one another, they talk quietly, and neither of them finds the Shiny.

——

“I played all the games growing up,” Ben tells her as they wait for their food to arrive on Saturday morning. They’re getting brunch together while they wait for everyone else in the Server to rise and shine for raiding. Ben’s pleased to learn that Rey’s an early riser. (“I just don’t sleep much,” he’d told her when she’d asked if he was ok eating earlier rather than later. Mornings before the world is awake are the best time in the world, and Ben’s never had anyone to share it with.) “I think Gold was my favorite. I was mad you couldn’t go back to Kanto or Johto when Ruby came out. That was one of the best parts of Gold.”

“I only started playing in 2016,” she says. “I’d never done anything with Pokémon before then. I’d heard of them, obviously, but I don’t know…” her voice trails away. “Never had a gaming console, but I could do this on my phone, so there it was. The world of Pokémon was open to me.”

“Oh, you’ve gotta play the games,” he tells her. “They’re wonderful. They got me through my childhood. I think you can play Red and Blue online so long as you don’t close out of the window. I have a link somewhere.”

“What do your parents do?” she asks them as they walk leisurely to the first raid of the morning. 

And Ben could answer like a normal human, but instead he replies by saying, “We don’t talk much—me and my parents.”

“Oh?”

“No.”

And he can see from her eyes that she heard the subtext in his voice quite as much as he’d heard it when she had told Finn he was replacing  _ her _ . 

“I always disappointed them. I disappoint everyone.”

“Except the Pokémon,” she says with a soft smile on her face.

“Yeah, well, still don’t have that Shiny Mewtwo, do I?”

“We’re working on that. I don’t either.”

It’s oddly comforting, that Rey doesn’t have the Shiny Mewtwo either. Given how fast she’d gotten Rayquaza and how many Suicunes she’d gotten—luck’s not on her side either this time around.

“Finn’s the best friend I’ve ever had,” Rey tells him as they stroll around the neighborhood, waiting for another raid to go to, eggs in incubators hoping for good hatches. (Ben would murder for a Shiny Azurill. Hux doesn’t have one yet and what he wouldn’t do to be able to rub hatching that baby before him.) “Like, I was a very closed off person for a long time.”

“Parents ditching you as a kid would do that to a person.” He says it bluntly and he hears her breath catch. 

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It does. Finn was the first person to get me to open up. I promise, we wouldn’t have been friends at all if it hadn’t been for Finn.” She looks so sad and Ben goes out on a limb and takes her hand. She gives him a smile. His stomach lurches.

“He won’t be gone from your life,” he says softly. “I can tell.” He actually has no idea if it’s true, but it feels like the right thing to say. It’d be what he would want to hear. 

And it seems to be what Rey wants to hear because she squeezes his hand and her eyes get a little less watery and a little more blazing. “Yeah, I know. I just have to remind myself that not everyone’s like my parents.”

They catch two more Mewtwos each and are walking by the lake when Rey squeals with delight. “Look!” she says and she’s showing him her phone screen. A pink Wynaut is smiling up at him. 

“Nice,” he grins, more than a little relieved that he already has this one. He doesn’t have to worry about jealousy, doesn’t have to worry about pretending to be happy for her when inside he’s burning with a failure that doesn’t even matter. 

“I have to remind myself that not everyone’s like my parents too,” he mutters later. There’s a gentle lull in the conversation. They’re on their way to the twelfth raid of the day, and he’s going to have to buy more raid passes soon if he doesn’t get this Shiny soon. He wonders if Rey will buy more, or if he’ll go the raids alone. He doesn’t necessarily expect her to buy passes. Some people have more reasonable budgeting when it comes to dropping money on this game than he does. “Not everyone’s gonna take one look at me and think I’m…” he swallows. He can’t bring himself to say it.

Which is when Rey hugs him. 

“I don’t know what you think you are,” she whispers to him. “But you’re not a monster.”

And he’s breathless, all of a sudden. He feels like he’s been punched in the chest. Because yeah, he’s understood for a while  _ why _ he always associated with Mewtwo in the Pokémon movie, but it’s one thing to think it and another to realize that he feels it so hard that she sees it in him that quickly. 

He doesn’t want her to pull away, but she does. He doesn’t want her to let him go. He doesn’t want to let her go.

Fuck.

Neither of them says a word, they just look at each other. There’s a part of him that thinks now would be the right time to kiss her. Maybe. He doesn’t know. He just wants to keep looking at her. Seeing her look at him like this… it makes him believe her when she says he’s not a monster.

“You leave Sunday, you said?” she asks quietly.

“Yeah,” he says. “For another two weeks.”

She looks so sad about that. It’s so raw, and he takes her hand again. “I’ll be back though. I promise.”

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I also need to…” she takes a deep breath. “I need not to take it as deeply, you know? Like yeah, I like you, but this is all still new.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t comfort you through it while you work on that.” That sounds far more mature than what he’s thinking.  _ I want to keep you safe from anything that hurts you, even if it’s you. I never want to hurt you, or to make you sad. I just want to see you smile. _

“I guess not,” she replies. “But I’ll have to get used to it, right? If you travel a lot for work?” She sounds afraid and he doesn’t kiss her, but he does pull her into his arms again and he feels her relax against his chest. 

Neither of them gets the Shiny. 

But when they do part ways for the night, Rey stands on the tips of her toes and kisses him.

——

They go out early on Sunday for more Mewtwo raids. Ben’s flight is at six, so that’ll be enough time, right? They keep an eye on Discord—what’s close to the trains, or busses? What’s an easy walk, or a bikeshare ride away? Where yesterday had felt leisurely, today feels nervous. 

Five raids turn into seven, turn into eight, and neither he nor Rey has any luck at all. His feet hurt from all the walking, and even though they refilled water bottles over lunch, he’s parched, and overheated, and sweaty. Rey’s put her hair up in a side ponytail again, and she’s definitely tanner than she was on Friday. 

“I think this has to be my last,” Ben says as they approach the raid. It’s three o’clock. He really should be getting back to get his suitcase. Even with TSA-Pre, he might be cutting it close if there’s traffic to the airport.

“Ok,” Rey says gently. “Fingers crossed.”

They enter the raid with the others, and Ben’s stomach is in knots the whole time.  _ Please, please, please. _

They beat the Mewtwo and he closes his eyes as he taps the screen through the reward for winning the raid. And when he opens his eyes.

“God-fucking- _ dammit _ !” and he hurls his phone to the ground. He can’t get anything done, he can’t keep anything together, he can’t get a fucking Shiny Mewtwo, he can’t be all he wants to be, do all he wants to do. He’s never been able to. He’ll never  _ be _ able to. He’ll never be what everyone wants him to be, no matter how fucking hard he tries. He’s a fucking failure. He always has been.

The screen shatters, glass crunching against the pavement.

And the world goes still around him. He can’t hear the passing cars, can’t hear the rumble of an elevated train car a few blocks away. He can only hear the shattering of glass and Rey’s sharp intake of breath.

And he can hear it now.

_ Ben, it’s just a game. _

_ What the fuck? _

_ You need to learn to control your anger, kid. _

_ Maybe you are a monster after all. _

Rey bends down and picks up his phone. On the screen, he can still see Mewtwo beneath the shattered glass. She hands it to him and he can’t even look at her. He’s too afraid of what he’ll see in her face. He already knows that people are staring at him, at them.

“I should go,” he says. “I should get my flight.”

“Ben,” she begins and he doesn’t want to hear it. He can’t hear it right now. He’d been—he’d just—“does it really matter to you that much?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just a game,” he mutters, stuffing his phone into his pocket. It’s easier for him to say it than to hear her say it. He’ll have to be careful of the glass shards. It wouldn’t be the first time. Fuck, he won’t be able to use this phone for his dummy account.

“It’s not an indication of your self worth, Ben,” she says. “Catching that Mewtwo, or that Suicune, or whatever. Just because it doesn’t happen doesn’t mean you’re…”

She’s fumbling for words and he can tell she’s trying to think of what would be comforting to her right now. “You’re not nothing.”

That’s when he looks at her. That’s when he finds her eyes with his. There’s a stubborn set to her jaw. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, ok.”

“I mean it,” Rey continues, and her gaze is laser focused on him and he feels almost like he can’t escape it—the fierce determination that he’s better than he lets himself think he is. “It’s not a measure of who you are or what you can be. This is.” She jabs a finger against his heart. “And this is good. Really good. Better than you even know. Just because I’m better at making friends now than I was doesn’t mean I just go spilling my guts to people over the first taco.”

He swallows. 

“I should get my flight,” he says again, looking at her. Her face changes. Not quite hurt, but not quite happy. She wasn’t done, and doesn’t want him to go. “I can’t miss it and I will if I stay much longer. But I’ll—I’ll message you when I land, ok?”

“Ok,” she says quietly. He turns, and—“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe take a break from the game? For a little bit? If it hits you this hard, it shouldn’t.”

He swallows. He doesn’t nod. But he doesn’t shake his head.

——

It’s not an intentional break. It’s mostly that he doesn’t have time to replace his phone while he’s away, and it’s not fucking pleasant throwing pokeballs across his battered screen. He doesn’t try raiding, he doesn’t try hunting. He sends gifts out the first morning he’s on the West Coast, but since he’s not really hunting he runs out of them fast. It doesn’t feel like a weight has been lifted, which he’s sure is what Rey would want. He feels edgy, like there’s something that he should be doing, that he is failing at doing.

Which, he supposes, was why she’d suggested taking a break.

Because it’s just a fucking game. And it’s not the only thing in the world that matters anymore. 

Rey is there too. 

Rey, who he’s messaging every day, who he has chicken tenders delivered to one night that she confesses to feeling too alone, who doesn’t ask what he’s caught or traded, but asks how he’s feeling, what he’s thinking, what he’s doing.

And it’s weird. He feels untethered. Off balance. But as he’s waiting in the airport after the week away, knowing he only has a weekend back in Coruscant, and ordinarily he’d just stay on the West Coast, but now he has a reason to come back in the intervening weekend, he clicks into the app and joins a Giratina raid in the airport terminal. 

He and the other travelers he can’t see, couldn’t locate to save his life, beat the Giratina. He idly clicks through the screens awarding him Rare Candy and Golden Razzberries to catch the creature and—

The red is blue. The gold is silver. A Shiny on his first try. 

But as he looks at it there’s no rush of relief, or pride. He’d completely forgotten that Shiny Giratina was even an option this week in his distress over not having gotten Shiny Mewtwo and breaking his phone screen. It feels nice. Not triumphant the way Shinies felt before. But good. Balanced a bit. More than in the past.

He catches it on the first throw and takes a screenshot. He toggles over to Discord and goes, not to  _ #bragging-rights _ but to @ChickenTenders and uploads it. 

_ kyloren: First time playing in a week and I got your Shiny luck. _

_ ChickenTenders: :hearteyes: _

_ ChickenTenders: so you  _ do _ bring something to the marriage. _

He smiles.

_ kyloren: It was good not playing this week. But I missed it. And it felt good playing again. _

_ ChickenTenders: So maybe you play a little less than you usually do when you come back? _

_ kyloren: Yeah, I was thinking that. I have some ideas of other things that might fill my time? _

_ ChickenTenders: Oh yeah?  _

_ kyloren: Yeah. _

_ ChickenTenders: Like what? _

_ kyloren: Like you. _

She doesn’t reply right away. He boards his flight, clicking into the DM every now and then, his heart in his throat. He buckles up in his extra-legroom seat and checks one last time before he has to put his phone in airplane mode and when he does, there’s a reply.

_ ChickenTenders: I like this plan. I like it a lot. _

**Author's Note:**

> hope you all enjoyed <3 
> 
> [here i am!](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)


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